All-out mayhem breaks loose among these groups, involving various metahumans associated with the United States military and civilian agencies.

Waller has murdered her double and is playing the role of traitor in order to ferret out the true mastermind behind the Janus Directive.

The fallout of the Janus Directive results in an irate President Bush reorganizing the various agencies to bring them under executive control; he dissolves Task Force X, the umbrella organization under which both Checkmate and the Squad operated (the component agencies becoming autonomous), and makes Sarge Steel a Cabinet-level official with overall control of all governmental metahuman activity on the civilian side.

Waller is soon imprisoned for taking matters into her own hands after leading an assassination team to personally liquidate the Vodou-oriented drug ring called the Loa.

While individual operatives like Firestorm (Ronald Raymond), Firehawk and Manhunter (Mark Shaw) did play a part in the storyline's resolution, they were nowhere as important as the characters in this chart.